Not On Page 1? You Might As Well be On Page 30!

Why is search engine optimization so important? Let’s face it. Getting your web site optimized could be the difference in making or breaking your online business. Think about it. When searching Google, do you typically look past the results on the first page? Do you look on page two, three, or four? No? I rarely look past the first page either. If you are not on the first page, you might as well be on page thirty. But you don’t have to stay there, and the best way to get on the first page is by optimizing your web site.

When I tell people what I do for a living, nine times out of ten they don’t understand what I’m talking about. This made me wonder how many web site owners understand the benefits of search engine optimization. The change can be remarkable for a web site when fully optimized. Did you know that the majority of all web site visits originate from a search engine? It’s easy to see why achieving high rankings with the search engines would be critical to the success of a web site. Yet, surprisingly, only a small percentage have been developed and/or optimized for the search engines.

Optimizing your site is just the first step, and results won’t appear overnight. It will take a little while to get to the front page, even when everything is done right. The work you do on your site will have a direct impact on the time it takes your SEO campaign to get you ranked and to stay ranked. There are a number of technical reasons ranking may take a while. For instance, directories need time to approve web links and search engines must find new links and re-spider new pages.

The benefits of ranking well far outweigh the time and hard work required to optimize a site. Your intention should not be to trick the search engines into thinking your site is the most relevant. Instead, focus on actually making your site the most relevant.

About Darren Bradley

8 Comments

In general, you’re right. Page 1 is where the money’s at. But it really depends on the keyword phrase and industry. Certain phrases people will dig into deeper search results for. For example, if I’m doing research for an academic paper or business case and need a specific statistic then clicking through to page 2, 3, sometimes even 4 isn’t uncommon. Also, if you’re a small business in a very competitive, niche market, then being on page 2 might not be so bad in the grand scheme of things.

Yes, the money is on page one, and typically it’s worth the time, effort, and cost it takes to get to the first page, but I think there are some cases where the search volume doesn’t justify the expense. You’ve got to be targeting the right keywords, too, or you could spend a lot of your resources to get very little return.

Yes, that is normally the case unless 95% of the results on the first page are focusing on broad term keywords and have no relevance. I see what you mean about being on the first page for a keyword, but people also need to realize this first page rankings usually best with longtail keywords otherwise you are wasting your efforts on non-converting broad keywords that never convert and only increase your bounce rate. SEO can learn a lot from SEM/PPC – broad keywords only increase bounce rate.

Definitely, the first page is where you get the traffic and the money too. I have a friend who run a very successful site on SEO and he is not working anymore. I think he earns around US$2,000 per month on adsense alone because of SEO.

Unfortunately, some SEO bloggers do not provide quality content. They just arrived in the first page because of link building and not really providing good content.

I hope that google in the long run will prioritize sites with quality content.

“I hope that Google in the long run will prioritize sites with quality content.”

I think that they try to do that but it’s not exactly the easiest thing to do since everything is automated. Link backs used to only occur when users found quality in a page and it’s content that’s why, I would assume, that this method was used. Now days, everyone just finds new ways to exploit that knowledge.

I think on the whole, Google does a good job putting the best sites at the top of the results. That’s why they’ve been so successful. But, like Dalesh says, it’s not always easy when it’s all automated, and when there is a huge financial incentive for site owners to game the system.